About OME

We are a multi-site collaborative effort among academic laboratories and a number of commercial entities.

The Open Microscopy Environment

We produce open tools to support data management for microscopy. Designed to interact with existing commercial software, all OME formats and software are free, and all OME source code is available under the GNU General public license or more permissive open source licenses, or through a commercial license from Glencoe Software. Discover our tools on BioSharing.

The OME Teams

OME developers are based in universities and research institutes around the world.

Commercial Partners

Project Goals

OME seeks to build specifications and software that allow scientists open, flexible, scalable and performant access to their imaging data.

OME is committed to building and releasing high quality, open source, well-supported software for the scientific imaging community. Our tools should work regardless of location, processing environment or data type.

The project’s foundation is an open metadata specification, the OME Data Model. This defines and describes the metadata elements and relationships that the project uses and supports. Using this specification, we build and release:

OMERO

Bio-Formats

A software plug-in that reads >140 proprietary file formats and converts them to an open, OME-based model that any software can use.

OME Files

A reference implementation that reads and writes OME-TIFF, an open file format that combines the popular, broadly supported TIFF format for storing binary pixel data, with an OME-based XML metadata header.

All of OME’s work and projects are funded by peer-reviewed grants are undertaken as collaborations with academic, industrial or commercial partners, so that the development of new tools and capabilities is always tied to real world, scientific use cases. Each individual partnership produces specific extensions to Bio-Formats and OMERO and these are always distributed to the global OME community to maximize the return and benefit of work and investment.

Funding

OME is funded through several grants from UK and EU agencies. Our current work is funded by the following: